


Mycelium Grieving

by Eflauta



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 05:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13474746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eflauta/pseuds/Eflauta
Summary: "Paul couldn’t save the Universe without him. He couldn’t save the universe, the crew, the Discovery, or even his research without Hugh. And he couldn’t save Hugh."





	1. Choice

Paul Stamets collapsed to the floor an an organized pile of anguish. The fungal forest stretched dead before him, sapped of life and life-giving death by the parasitic infection of Prototaxites stellaviatori. His life’s work was in shambles, and the mycelial network was _hell._

And Hugh was gone.

For the first time in more than a decade, Paul Stamets was well and truly alone.

  


Echoes of the past filled the dead air around him, doing little more to soothe the pain than salt in a broken wound. It wasn’t hard to see where he’d gone wrong, lying to his partner the way that he had. His pursuit of discovery had truly been at the cost of all else. Hugh lay cold in the morgue and his forest hung grey and limp, and it had been for _nothing._

Paul knew he was brilliant. He knew he was brilliant and obsessed and prodigical and groundbreaking and unparalleled and genius. And he knew that it was utterly worthless - that _he_ was utterly worthless without him.

All of the scientific breakthoughs in the Universe couldn’t mean more than Hugh ever had to him. Than Hugh _did_ mean to him. But with Hugh in the network and the Spore forest Bay dead, he was running out of ideas.

His fingers ran cold in the damp chill of the bay. It always felt like the Pacific Northwest in there, like the forests he so often explored. It felt like earth, and progress, and patience. And it felt like every walk he dragged Hugh on back home. 

He should have dragged him on more.

 

They used to walk, when Paul felt cooped up and Hugh was antsy and both of them had the time off. It wasn’t often. But they’d walk in the old growth forests outside the sprawling reach of modern San Francisco. Paul couldn’t leave his research behind and Hugh never asked him to. He never asked that Paul stop noticing the fungal growth on trees or mushrooms on the forest floor. He just smiled, and listened. Paul got the sneaking feeling that Hugh was amassing enough mycology knowledge to pass a Baccalaureate exam, but that didn’t stop either of them.

Invariably, Paul would lapse into silence after long enough of Hugh listening. There was something about walking together hand and hand, in the old majestic growth, that hushed the endless running thoughts that drove Paul’s mind. It was simple, like existing without care or mind.

All he really needed for that was Hugh - the fungi were really superfluous. Of course, if you’d asked him 10 days ago he would have scoffed and denied it altogether. But the truth was that given the choice between his life’s work and his partner… Hugh won out every time.

  
If only he had _known._


	2. Resistance

The soft blue glow of his screen lit the angles of his features in sharp relief. After his little moment back there, he’d thrown himself into the data the sensors had been amassing. It struck him as odd that both Tyler and Burnham and Lorca were absent - Tyler in mind, if not body.  Only the original compliment of the crew was present, which was something for a later time, when he didn’t have alternate quantum variances screaming at him like impatient numbers.

It was so  _ wrong _ in this new universe that even their viewfinders malfunctioned from time to time. They adjusted too quickly, and too severely, sometimes shutting out more light than necessary and other times flooding the camera. It was like everything was just slightly sideways and the crew couldn’t set themselves straight.

Everything was thrown off kilter.

 

The only solution that Paul found was throwing himself into the data. Science was an old, familiar habit that almost drown out the deafening vacuum of space. It almost insulated his mind from the atrophying connection he no longer held to the emptying spore pods behind him. The network was only beautiful when it was healthy.  Feeling it succumb to the leechings of a predatory mycelium was akin to watching a bird drowning in its sleep. There was nothing he could do, now. The fungus had spread too far.

Hours passed without comment. He’d committed the new quantum variance to memory early on, and found the universe otherwise near identical. The information stolen by Burnham was invaluable in gleaning the scientific workings of their temporary location. Cultural commentary and military data was otherwise auxiliary, but worth a glance or three. Casual mentions usually belied supposedly innocent limitations as treacherous realities.

On a hunch he asked the replicator to synthesize some soil in a large, flat-bed container. He placed it down in the reaction cube and left it there with little hope. Maybe, just maybe something would take root but- probably not. It would have to take mycelium anyway.

A half day or so later, he pulled up a chair and kept going.  Coffee never materialized at his elbow so at the end of the beta shift he left for the mess hall to get some. By the end of the Delta shift he was beginning to understand things, and by the end of the Gamma shift he thought maybe that he saw spores.

It wasn’t until his third cup of coffee and the end of the Alpha shift that he passed out at his desk. The smooth, unforgiving desktop stood in for a pillow as he gained what was possibly the  _ least _ restful sleep he’d had in ages. His back arked itself into a few stubborn cricks and his neck twisted at an almost unnatural angle, but as his subordinates concluded, at least he was finally asleep. 

When it was almost Delta shift, he woke up with a jolt and nearly sent his leftover coffee to the floor. With little hesitation, he grabbed the mug and downed the cold, bitter liquid instead.

If it weren’t for the lack of a coffee machine in engineering, he wouldn’t have left at all. 

 

A handful of shifts in he started feeling dizzy. It was that nagging, sluggish feeling that doesn’t go away and gnaws at your stomach. Anxiety, or grief, or just effects from the spores - residual emotions and after effects. So he finished his coffee and closed his eyes for a moment.

When he opened them it was to the sight of familiar, white uniforms. Instinctively, he searched for Hugh but out of three medical personnel, he couldn’t find him. It took less than a second to remember why.

 

Somewhat pathetically, he let out a thin groan.

“You fainted” Commented a blonde doctor named Sherryl. She had eaten dinner with Hugh and Paul a few times, and while she held seniority, she outranked neither the late doctor nor the Lieutenant.

Paul groaned again.

“When was the last time you ate something?”

Pauls expression roughly resembled that of a cadet attempting advanced calculus in his head. “Not  _ that _ long ago.”

Sherryl applied another hypospray to his neck and made him lay there, staring up at the engineering bay ceiling for another 15 minutes.

“The least you could do is pass me my PADD”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Not a chance, Lt. Stamets”

“Sherryl, you  _ know _ me.”

“And I know that you need food. Come on. Mess hall after this, no working.”   


Stamets knew a compromise when he heard one, and formulated a plan to snag someone’s PADD when no one was looking. Without Hugh, there was no way to keep a close eye on him, and he planned to take advantage of that.

 

It wasn’t until 3 shifts and 4 Observation decks later that he fell asleep in a chair. It was only a nap but it was enough to keep him going for a while. He managed to visit the cargo bays and scour the remnants from the Glenn and grab a mountain of nutrient dense protein bars before he even needed coffee again.

His next nap was at his desk.

The one after that in a corner of the Spore Bay.

The one after that was involuntarily at his desk again, followed by one in the smallest observation deck after his team kicked him out of the lab. He tried to claim that they couldn’t, he outranked them, but Tilly threatened to tell the CMO, and Paul really didn’t need her crawling up his ass for neglecting himself.

 

It was a week before Paul realized he’d been avoiding his quarters. There were enough sonic showers and common restrooms that he’d neglected that part of his life without much thought. Desks and metal chairs made better beds than one without Hugh in it.

 

 

He held out another week. 


	3. Hope

In the end, it was loneliness that brought him back. Two weeks without so much as the _sight_ of Hugh’s clothes had driven his footsteps down familiar corridors and to the door he’d been dreading the most.

 _It wasn’t the morgue,_ he thought bleakly. It wasn’t the morgue that he feared the most. The dead body of his partner was already something he’d cradled in his arms. Something he’d already held, and touched, and known, even as the cold stiffness of death had set in. They’d had to pry him from his partner’s body.

This was something much worse.

 

The doors hissed open. His footsteps fell loudly in the hollow space, the light of stars shining in through the windows. It exactly the way they had left it, with Hugh’s pillows stacked a little higher, and the covers slightly askew. The standard issue table was littered with datapads and the desk was still at an angle.

It was nothing like how it had been in the mycelial network. That space had been tidy, decorated, and little too foreign to the daily habits of a couple.  It had shone with starlight and desperation and held his last kiss.

He didn’t think he’d ever get to fall in love in the first place. It certainly wasn’t going to happen again.

He didn’t think he could do it.

Even this hurt too much.

Even this-

 

Tears blurred his vision, unbidden but not- not entirely unexpected. Without thought he sat down on the nearest flat surface and found himself on the edge of their bed. It was tempting to wrap himself in the covers and curl up, but he knew they would just smell like Hugh.

Everything did anyway. Even two weeks of absence couldn’t erase his partner’s presence. It couldn’t erase the way that Hugh had lived here for a few days without him.

It couldn’t erase his love.

 

In the end, Paul slept passed out cold on Hugh’s side of the bed.  

 

Deep, motionless sleep took him to memories of futures untold and pasts lived twice. It took him to the Opera houses by Starbase 46 and the moons of Andor and Alpha Centauri and every evening spent alone together. It took him to quarrels and make-ups and make-outs and fucking and to every gentle moment shared between Hugh and him. He dreamt of the way Hugh looked in the mornings, and the way his breathing evened out at night and the way he looked at him in the mirror and how he looked in his dress clothes. And all at once he longed for more than just the weight of blankets and the hug of his too-snug uniform. He breathed deep though, and slow, and slept for as long as he needed until his body couldn’t possibly sleep anymore.

A hollow had carved itself out in the center of his chest by the time he woke up. It gaped, cavernous as sleep drifted away from him like desert sand.  Not even dreams could fill the way he ached for that familiar touch. If falling asleep without Hugh had been hell, then waking up was something worse. It was the absence of warmth and familiarity, and it was waking up to strange light and light blankets and cold where there should be comfort. It was knowing that no one lay across from him, waiting for “good morning.” And it was knowing that Hugh would never kiss him again.

 

“Nothing in here is ever truly gone.”

Hugh’s words mocked him in echo.

 

Everything _was_ truly gone without the hope of access. Without a healthy forest, there were no healthy spores, and without healthy spores there was no access, no jumping, and no Hugh. Paul knew the atrophying death on their ship was merely symptomatic of a larger, Universal death, but that didn’t stop him from caring singularly about the fate of his partner. Locked in the network with the spread of Prototaxites stellaviatori, Hugh was dying a second death. This one slow, parasitic, and vastly more final.

Paul couldn’t save the Universe without him. He couldn’t save the universe, the crew, the Discovery, or even his research without Hugh. And he couldn’t save Hugh.

In some mimicry of a routine, Paul pried himself from the covers. Tears would be useless at this point, so he scrubbed them away with an inattentive hand. The covers wouldn’t smell like Hugh soon, so he might as well shower.

He skipped brushing his teeth.

He didn’t skip breakfast

 

He arrived in engineering looking more well rested than he had in months. Determination edged his every step despite the deep seated grief that still lined his posture. Nothing could erase that. 

Nothing except.

For the small flat tray in the Spore Cube.

 

That was now growing mushrooms.

 

The End.


End file.
